The Pleasure of His Company : A MODEL WORLD: And Other Stories, <i> By Michael Chabon (William Morrow: $18.95; 205 pp.)</i>

Michael Chabon writes a prose so engaging--so rapid, graceful, allusive, and resourceful--that its reader can’t help feeling flattered, singled out for brilliant attention, as when a witty friend brings every last ounce of vivacity to a conversation.

In the novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” Chabon’s first book, joi de vivre was half the story. The other half was a diligently plotted plot, variously enamored characters, a brooding gangster father and the young narrator’s troubled decoding of his own sexuality. The novel included, as an anti-romantic element, the industrial swelter of summer Pittsburgh, yet it was romance, really, that carried the day.

It was a largely unclouded summer’s day: The exhalations of factories never smelled toxic, fear of AIDS did not haunt gay sex, and the mourners at a funeral included “drunks, mysterious riffraff” and a grieving girlfriend dressed to achieve an effect of “comic sadness.” If the other characters’ escapades seemed sometimes less absorbing than the narrator’s changeable, resplendent sensibility, there was not a dead moment, stylistically, in the entire book. In its elan, the novel shone a radical light on a good deal of recent fiction. Look what was missing: bliss!

Sheer delight in existence looms similarly large in the 11 stories of this collection. The pleasures of these tales are very much the pleasures offered by “Mysteries.” Here again is the happiness with the English language, the artful placement of the audacious word, the beautiful days, the taste for incongruities. Like John Cheever, Chabon can wring several eloquent shades from emotions that previously seemed simple: bravado, nostalgia, regret, embarrassment and--especially, surpassingly--infatuation.

“Her face had grown wider, her cheekbones more pronounced, since the last time he had seen her, and with her tawny skin and her thick eyebrows and that big, wild hair Nathan thought she looked beautiful and a little scary.” (“A Lost World.”)

“Roksana is Iranian--or Persian, as she prefers to say--big and black-haired; her lips and lashes are thick and dark; she can beat me up. She is the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, but when she’s angry or seized by Persian lust, something enters her face and she gets to looking savage, ancient, one-quarter ape.” (“Blumenthal on the Air.”)

“(There was) Kim in a long cable sweater that sagged at the neck and reached down to the tops of her knees. . . . I wanted her again. Harry was my best friend, but millionaires have squandered their fortunes, and men have lost their minds, and friends have tracked each other down for less than the sight of a lovely woman in nothing but a sweater.” (“Millionaires.”)

“A Model World” offers an array of disarming, quick-witted male leads; pretty, displaced women; eccentric male friends; and, in the linked stories titled, as a group, “A Lost World,” a crumbling family, the Shapiros, the housewife mother and bearded psychiatrist father as baffled by what is happening to them as are their two sons.

Plots evolve lucidly, with wily twists and a fair incidence of Maguffins, revelatory letters or notes or objects on which the plot turns. Evocation of place is central yet offhand: In “The Little Knife,” the Shapiros visit “a place called the Sandpiper--a ragged, charming oval of motel cottages painted white and green as the Atlantic.”

“Millionaires” and “Smoke,” set in Pittsburgh, revive the intimate ruefulness Chabon directs at that city. “Blumenthal” is set in France; “S Angel,” “Ocean Avenue” and the title story in Southern California.

Southern California is a feast for the lively genius of Michael Chabon’s social discernment. When Bobby Lazar in “Ocean Avenue” approaches his ex-lover Suzette in Laguna Beach’s Cafe Zinc, “he could have predicted, still, exactly what she would order: a decaf au lait and a wedge of frittata with two little cups of cucumber salsa . . . . When she saw who it was her dazzling green eyes grew tight little furrows at the corners.”

A vehement and rivalrous materialism characterizes their affair. During their breakup she sells his “collection of William Powelliana, which was then at its peak and contained everything from the checkered wingtips Powell wore in ‘The Kennell Club Murder Case’ to . . . a 1934 letter from Dashiell Hammett congratulating Powell on his interpretation of Nick Charles,” and he sold her 1958 and ’59 Barbie dolls “for not quite four thousand dollars, (so) she brought the first suit against him.” The sly point is not simply that these treasures have been sold: They’ve been sold for less than they were worth, which is true treachery. Freshened memories of this calculating mutual diminishment don’t deter the couple from resuming their affair. The “accident” of truly heedless sexual attraction has happened to them.

As a lightly handled leitmotif, the heartlessness at the heart of heterosexuality figures in several stories. The older woman in “S Angel” has a “fading face, which (Ira) nonetheless . . . found beautiful, and in which, in the skin at her throat and around her eyes, he thought he could read strife and sad experience and a willingness to try her luck.” S might stand for sadness, central to an experience Ira has never had, being in love. When he does fall, it’s for someone even surer than the angel to bring him a full measure of remorse, and before sealing his fate with a kiss Ira swallows some pills identified only as “two little pink teardrops,” stolen from the fading angel’s purse.

Occasionally Chabon’s whimsical touch subverts potential seriousness. In “More Than Human,” Dr. Shapiro, whose job at a private psychiatric clinic for children exposes him to “various and fairly sinister childhood lunacy,” observes that, “like those of his patients, (his son) Nathan’s was an almost heartbreakingly plain face, and in it he thought he could read the same short narrative of rage and confusion. . . . The boy was cognizant, however dimly, of the fear and shame and failure his father could not bring himself to express, and had already begun--accidentally--to retaliate.”

It is one of the most striking passages in the Shapiro stories, yet the doctor’s point of view is shortly traded for Nathan’s. Nathan views his father, near the story’s end, “as a kind of adored, only occasionally dangerous giant, a dexterous bear with a vast repertoire of tricks.” What happened to the rage and confusion the father saw? Why is his complicated, disillusioned point of view established only to be dropped?

Like “Mysteries of Pittsburgh” before it, “A Model World” is a consummately appealing book. For a second time, Chabon leaves his reader grateful for his art, his wry insight, and the oddly hopeful bent of his splendid inventiveness.